He could easily walk to the park, but at eleven o’clock he took the Indian down Jarvis to Sunset, left on First, right on Hawthorne, and then up Glade. The ride was just long enough for him to conjure Kate’s face as she opened the little box and slid the ring on her finger and closed her hand. In that moment she had looked like a girl discovering a remedy for sorrow, not because she was marrying him but because she was claiming something for herself. And he thought if he never did anything else, he had made that moment and he loved her like a river.
Tacker parked in a grassy triangular easement at the intersection of West End and Glade, uphill from the park, where he could watch the crowd gathering. The white tents glowed in the overcast day. An abundance of white children waited in hot boredom. Tacker never would have noticed white children if he had not gone to Nigeria, where all the children were brown and to see a white one was to see an exotic species. The boys wore no cover-ups, only their suits. The girls wore skirts, and the tops of their bathing suits showed. Mothers wore shifts and something his mother called a muumuu, a large shapeless dress in loud colors, a design from the new state of Hawaii. A clique of teenage boys held themselves separately under a tree, barefoot next to their bicycles, wearing cutoff jeans. One of them was smoking. Some were as tall as Tacker and as big. They had the look of animals whose territory was shrinking. Tacker wondered if he had ever looked that way. He thought of the kid with his father who had beaten Gaines up in front of Hart’s. The older girls stood thirty yards from the boys under an almost identical tree, confabbing about something, turned inward while the boys faced out. Their hair was perfectly set and Tacker wondered if they were going to ruin their coifs by swimming or if they would sit on towels applying Coppertone and conjuring indifference. It was a great relief to him that he found not one of the girls of interest. He didn’t see Kate and was about to park the Indian and run up her steps to see if she was still home when he caught a whiff of popcorn from the concession stand. Something felt wrong and he couldn’t remember if he had told Gaines’s cousin to lock the house when he left her with Valentine. There was time. He better go back and check. Normally he wouldn’t think much of it, but this was a big day. It seemed important that everything be tidy and stitched up. He got back on the Indian, made a wide turn on the street, and headed back, parking in front of the foursquare because it would only take a minute. The house was locked but he opened the door and went in. Valentine and Juliette were sitting on the couch with a book and da Vinci.
“Thought I might have left the back door unlocked,” he said and moved through the house to check. It was as locked as the front door had been. Tacker made one more visit to the bathroom. “I won’t be long,” he said on his way out of the house. Somehow da Vinci leapt out the door behind him and Tacker had to go bounding after the cat four blocks until the animal decided to stretch out on the grass of a neighbor’s yard and wait for his master to scoop him up. By the time Tacker got back to the pool, things were rolling. Dignitaries had arrived. A huge red ribbon was now strung across the gravel walkway. The mayor flourished a large set of scissors. Kate was down there, her legs splayed so she could hold the camera still. She seemed alarmingly far away. The mayor cut the ribbon. Kate got the picture. The crowd pressed in. The largest teenage boys claimed remnants of the ribbon and held them up like flags. They were the first to jump in, while all around the pool the younger children hovered like little ducks uncertain of what to do when faced with the sea.
Tacker left the bike and sauntered across the park. The gray clouds had lifted and the sky was blue enough for a postcard. The mayor had his perfect day.
“There you are,” Kate said. “I’d started to think you weren’t coming.”
“I watched the festivities from the sidelines,” he said, spotting Tom Driskell across the pool. He waved.
“No such luxury for the photographer,” she said.
They sat in the grass. “Want something to drink?” Tacker said.
“I’m fine,” Kate said.
A little girl stood on the side of the pool in the shallow end. Her mother was in the water coaxing her to jump. The girl wore a pink swimming suit and had a pink plastic float around her waist, but she wouldn’t jump. Finally, her mother convinced her to come down one step at a time, though it took several minutes on each step.
“I should get her picture,” Kate said when the little girl was in the pool in her tube.
Kate was midway down the side of the pool when Tacker heard stones crunching, then a sigh as if the earth had exhaled. Kate stopped midstride and lifted her camera toward what would one day be the entrance to the bathhouse. “Hells bells,” someone yelled. “Stephanie, come right here,” a mother cried. “Niggers,” someone called.
Schraa schraa schraa.
Fabric and air and resistance and five dark bodies wheeled toward the pool, leaping, exploding into the water. Children screamed. Mothers snatched their youngest and headed to the shallow end, where they could exit. The older boys hoisted themselves out of the deep end like fish leaping from the sea. Kate snapped furiously.
The Negro boys breaststroked to the opposite side, leapt out, and were off in a sprint before anyone could stop them. Tom Driskell had both hands at his mouth.
“My word,” a woman said.
“Jesus Christ,” a man said.
“Can they be arrested, Mama?” said a young girl.
“I hope so, baby.”
* * *
• • •
KATE RUSHED TOWARD Tacker and he to her. “Are you okay?” he said.
“I’m fine,” she said, her eyes bright.
They stood in the midst of the confused crowd. No one knew whether it was safe to get back in the pool.
“They were only in there a few seconds. Not even a minute. I don’t think that’s long enough to contaminate the water,” one of the high school boys said. “I’m getting back in.”
The girls were still on their towels, their heads swiveling back and forth in conversation. The one who seemed in charge must have decided they should stay, because one of her lessers got up to go to the concession stand and bought a Coke.
Half the families packed up.
* * *
• • •
“I’LL MEET YOU at your house around six?” Tacker said to Kate.
“Okay,” she said and headed toward her car.
Almost to his bike, Tacker spied Valentine. She was on the gravel, headed toward the pool. He didn’t call—he ran for her. She was faster than he expected her to be. Twenty feet from the poolside, she stopped and looked around.
“Valentine,” Tacker called. “Honey. Wait.”
She turned to look back at Tacker, recognizing his voice, but already two of the white high school boys had latched on to her and were scrambling toward the pool.
I’m almost there, Tacker thought. Don’t let go. But even as he ran, they swung her back and launched her over the water. Her body was a lavender arc in the air, her braids back, her shoes bravely pointed toward heaven.
Tacker leapt in after her. She was near the bottom, her eyes closed, bubbles escaping her mouth. For a horrible moment Tacker thought she was already dead but she opened her eyes and even underwater he saw her terror.
They broke the surface and it took only three strokes for Tacker to reach the side of the deep end. He held her in one arm and the poolside with the other. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you. You’re okay.”
Her lips trembled. She closed her eyes.
He would not look into their faces. He would get her out of the pool in perfect quiet. Tacker let go of the side and swam with Valentine toward the shallow end.
“Keep your eyes down,” he said.
He lifted her out.
“Juliette went to the bathroom and locked the door,” she said.
“Shhhhh,” Tacker said.
He set her down and
held her hand. One shoe was missing. He leaned toward her ear. “We’re going to walk out of here and get on my bike and go to my house and da Vinci,” he said.
She didn’t say anything.
Tacker heard a chair turn over and pulled Valentine closer. She shivered and he put his hand on her head. He looked up. A wooden Coca-Cola box streaked malignantly through the air like a heavy mechanical kite and he ducked.
A locomotive hit his head just before a riot went off in his chest and he glimpsed creosote ties under the steel track. Something slackened. Then a pain like a railroad spike to his skull. Valentine’s face bloomed before him, her eyes as large and round as airplane windows, and he thought he could see a whole continent there. But the clouds closed in and the spike hit again. He sought speech and heard something deep inside back up and shift gears and roll through his head.
Oh my God.
Someone get an ambulance.
Light streamed under the track down into the earth like high beams from a truck and he tumbled back and faced the sky and everything was as red as Kate’s mother’s skirt in her portrait, only there was a perfect circle of pink. He could smell the pink circle—like the Indian and Kate’s hair. He reached toward it for Kate and she pulled him through the hidden door.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Summer 1963
KATE HAD TURNED in her key to the Journal and Sentinel. This morning she folded her blouses one more time and eyed her luggage. She surveyed the shoes she had selected: black pumps, white flats, two pairs of sandals, a pair of tennis shoes. Once more she sorted through the cotton skirts and shifts and reminded herself that she also had the summer suit. She glanced in the mirror at her short haircut and decided for the tenth time that it was too abrupt.
Brian would be here midafternoon. She started downstairs to make herself a tuna salad sandwich and sat at the picnic table to eat it. The first hydrangeas were blooming, small brackets turning from white to blue. A male bluebird left the bluebird house and returned with bits of food in tireless rounds. Full-leafed dogwoods threw shadow onto the deep brown mulch of the flower beds. She heard a woodpecker somewhere.
Early in February, Kate had applied for the Peace Corps, requesting as first choice Nigeria. For the two years she was away, Brian would remain in her house and go to Wake Forest College.
Charges of involuntary manslaughter had been brought against the boy who threw the Coca-Cola crate that caused Tacker’s death. Involuntary manslaughter. According to the medical examiner, it wasn’t the initial contact with the box that had cracked Tacker’s skull and flooded his brain but hitting the concrete poolside. Tacker’s parents requested the charges be dropped, but the state still sentenced the boy to a center for juvenile delinquents for two years. Much later, when Kate developed her film from that morning of the pool opening, she was startled to see a picture of the very boy, smiling in his cut-off blue jeans. This was before: before he threw the Coca-Cola box, before he was found guilty. And he looked like any American boy, or any white American boy, with his youthful chest and lean arms and upward-tilted face, as if the world were his and more, and she wondered how such anger and even hatred could have fomented in him at so young an age. To her he looked like an innocent. This seemed, finally, the clear truth of the camera: that the eye sees what it expects to see. As long ago, she had expected that Gaines—carrying the milk bottle—was up to no good. Unless the eye is corrected, all vision is lost.
Tacker lived for two days before his parents took him off life support. Gaines and Valentine held vigil with Kate and Tacker’s parents through the forty-eight hours.
There was no hope, but Kate hoped. In the askewness of Tacker’s face, he must be deliberating a problem in mathematics or in the eventual crossing of all lines. She pressed a finger to his forehead to smooth the frown gathered there.
Don’t leave me, oh God, don’t leave me.
When it was over she experienced a darkness so acute she thought she would die. Brian left the beach house and came to live with her. Still, in a month she lost fifteen pounds. Aunt Mildred took her to the doctor. She was put on a medication that made her nauseated and she lost even more weight. Her engagement ring fell off and she had to wear it on a chain around her neck.
Brian was her salvation. She wept into his arms. For him, she would eat potato soup or a BLT. He washed her hair in the large kitchen sink and when it was dry made her sit in the fall garden of the backyard and drink hot cocoa. He prodded her to walk with him. They put out chrysanthemums. Kate was surprised and laughed finally the evening he produced a lopsided meat loaf and served it up with mashed potatoes and green beans.
In the evenings he read to her. George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which she had never gotten to, and The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell. By the time they picked up The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, Kate was reading to him.
Little by little she began to feel she might live.
She woke one morning with a sense more of anticipation than dread. Brian gave her the family she had not had in a very long time. Their embrace was a form of shelter, a home.
On a cold November morning when Brian was out, Gaines and Valentine showed up at Kate’s back door.
“I’m here to help you with your yard,” Gaines said. He wore bib overalls and an old coat.
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Miss Monroe, I’m asking to come onto your porch without alarming your neighbors. Understand?”
“Oh.”
They carried in a Tupperware bowl of banana pudding and she invited them into the house and they sat in the library together and ate out of the bowl with three spoons until it was gone.
Before they left, Gaines invited Kate to a meeting at a church in Happy Hill.
“You’ll be welcomed.”
“Do you think?”
In the Negro church that was brown inside, calming light fell through yellowed glass windows. Kate heard only a hum of voices, and when the meeting was over and they adjourned to a downstairs room for refreshments, she drank milk and ate brownies and pound cake with canned peaches. She went to the church every time Gaines asked, just to be there. Mid-December she picked up her camera and walked to Tacker’s foursquare—it had not been re-rented—and took pictures. The nandina berries blazed red in the corner bed and the cedars shone aqua green, though the hardwoods were bare and leaf litter covered the garden she and Tacker had revealed in their day of raking only five months ago. Before leaving, she sat in Tacker’s porch swing in her heavy coat.
The foursquare was the opposite of a round house. Still it felt like a womb she had been wrenched from. She wondered if people always loved more after death and if this was the beginning of religion.
In February, she threw a birthday party for Valentine at her house on Glade, inviting Tacker’s parents along with Gaines and the birthday girl. At the Negro church, talk turned to freedom rides. These would require buses full of students and activists throughout the South, traveling to various locations to test whether new integration laws were being obeyed.
“Don’t go,” Kate said to Gaines when the meeting broke and they had a moment alone in the hallway. “Go back to college. You’ll be able to do more with a degree. If anything happened to you, it would kill Valentine.”
Kate took pictures of a protest at the Winston bus depot and developed them herself before giving them to Gaines for the Negro press.
Ground for the bathhouse was cleared in March and it opened on July 4, 1962, dedicated to Tacker Hart. On the eve of its opening, the city council voted to integrate the pool. At first white families stayed away, but by August a few came and Kate believed it was because of Tacker, because they still thought of him as the football player at Reynolds High, their all-American boy.
She offered to return the engagement ring to Tacker’s mother but she asked her to keep it and Kate wore it on her right hand. When Kate got her ass
ignment to Nigeria, she called Mrs. Hart before calling Brian or Aunt Mildred. A few days later, Tacker’s mother brought over two letters from Tacker’s friend Samuel Ladipo.
“I thought you might like to write to him. I’m sure Tacker told you about Samuel.” She started to leave. “Do you think Valentine would like to visit da Vinci? Do you think her brother would bring her over to our house?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “It’s a perfect idea.”
Kate wrote to Samuel but he didn’t write back.
* * *
• • •
KATE WAS STATIONED in the town of Akure, two hours from the town of Osogbo, three hours from Ibadan. Stationed with her was Marilyn Mayse, a nurse from Birmingham, Alabama. They shared a two-bedroom house and Kate taught English in a local school. She also rigged up a darkroom and one evening a week she taught a class in photography to a group of young men. No Nigerian women, it appeared, wished to learn photography. Kate and Marilyn’s kitchen was equipped with a kerosene refrigerator and a two-burner range. The house was powered by a small generator that went on the fritz now and then, and when it did they cooked outdoors over an open fire and mixed their powdered milk in the morning and drank it lukewarm. At least there was a reliable water supply through a faucet in the kitchen, though they had to boil the water. They bathed in a large galvanized tin tub, warming the water every night. Their radio could pick up the BBC as well as the Voice of America if they happened to be up at three in the morning.
A boy named Abel served as their courier according to his own design. He was not officially hired by the Peace Corps or by Kate and Marilyn. Thus he could not be sacked. He might have been eight or he might have been twelve; it was hard to know. In his brown shorts and brown shirt, he reached Kate’s shoulders. Yet his face suggested a mature awareness of life. After a few weeks, they accepted his daily delivery of town gossip, folklore, and news from the capital. He also dutifully reported on the number of baptisms that occurred each week along with the number of people who had consulted with the local herbalist about their illnesses. He was deeply disturbed that Kate and Marilyn did not attend Sunday services and prayed for them aloud in their presence. Finally Kate began attending the Anglican church, though Abel was only modestly satisfied since he attended the Baptist church. As a kind of retaining fee, he accepted a Coca-Cola on Sunday and dashes, or tips, from Kate or Marilyn when they actually asked him to perform some duty.
Swimming Between Worlds Page 33